With the popularity of wireless “digital” computing devices, such as, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's) cell phones, cameras, video, audio recorders and other digital recorders, users have been afforded the ability to record and transmit digital media within seconds.
With the advent of digital media, it has become increasingly easy to copy, counterfeit, falsify and misuse digital information of all kinds. This includes digital photographs, video & audio recordings of speech or musical performances, motion pictures and recordings of physical phenomena, such as meter readings or “black box” records. This digital media can be altered in ways that defy detection, audio recordings can be compressed and anonymously offered to the public with impunity, and time and date stamps on any of the media just listed can be easily changed with freely available tools.
An attendant problem is that of secure storage. While a flash memory card within these digital recording devices (in any of its currently popular forms) can hold hundreds of pictures, images, video and audio, the problem with securely storing, indexing and retrieving thousands of media files has still not been solved. When the works of intellectual property (music, software, images and movies, to name a few) are much more valuable than the equipment on which they reside, the temptation for theft and alteration becomes great.
Furthermore, this invention provides for the secure non-repudiation by embedding Certificate Authorities non-repudiation Digital Certificates of the digital files for forensic or other evidentiary purposes that are sent and received across the transmission networks.
This works for any kind of media file—photographs, images, music, audio spoken word, video, physical phenomena—anything. Obvious applications range from taking a photograph, video clip to “black boxes” embedded in transportation facilities. Following an incident, information could be transmitted using the above schemes to a storage facility. Only authorized personnel could then retrieve the encrypted messages and return the data to cleartext form.